Model Selection and Evaluation Based on Emerging Infectious Disease Data Sets including A/H1N1 and Ebola

Liu, Wendi; Tang, Sanyi; Xiao, Yanni

Although susceptible-infective-removal (SIR) compartmental model is commonly used to describe the transmission dynamics of an infectious disease, it cannot be used when we consider only the cumulative infected population and capture the temporal variations of an outbreak, such as the turning point that is the point in time at which the rate of accumulation changes from increasing to decreasing. Several models have been proposed to estimate basic reproduction number, turning point, and final size by cumulated cases; some of them are based on purely empirical relationship, while others have a theoretical basis and are realized by differential equations. The simplest and commonly applied model among all the infectious disease models is the Richards model [3] [4] [5] . By employing Richards model, Hsieh et al. investigated the characteristics including basic reproduction number, turning point, and final size for influenza such as H1N1 [3] , SARS [4] , and Dengue [5] by fitting Richards model to the reported cumulative cases.